Drury Lane's dazzling 'Cabaret' takes you on a terrifying thrill-ride to 1930s Berlin

August 22, 2009|By Chris Jones, TRIBUNE CRITIC

'Cabaret' ****

Of all the characters who populate John Kander and Fred Ebb's masterful Broadway concoctions, none is as mesmerizing, or as terrifying, as the Emcee of "Cabaret." "Wilkommen," he sings, opening up his bag of ironic tricks and welcoming you to the gloriously horrible party taking place in Berlin -- even as the world topples like a smug Teutonic drunk into a terrifying and inevitable abyss.

If you're at a good production of this iconic musical -- and director and choreographer Jim Corti's eye-popping new revival at Drury Lane Oakbrook Terrace is a great, great production -- your heart lands in your mouth when the Emcee sings "Tomorrow Belongs to Me," lest history be rewritten.

In recent years, the Emcee has become the province of postmodern personalities -- I'm thinking of Alan Cumming at Sam Mendes' 1998 Broadway revival, which also starred the late Natasha Richardson, or, last year, Bruce Dow at the Stratford Festival in Canada. These charismatic actors turned in self-aware performances dripping with polysexual flourish. But they were individuals floating in their own sea. You never believed they could belong in Christopher Isherwood's novel about the Kit Kat Club in the Berlin of the 1930s.

But in the case of Patrick Andrews, the young Chicago actor whose work in Corti's show is simply dazzling, you are left with no doubt whatsoever. The brilliance of Corti's conception and Andrews' blond performance -- far more interesting than the others named above -- is that this Emcee neither stands apart from that world nor dominates it with his personality.

Andrews, whose work is self-deprecating, shy and perversely sweet, is wholly of that world. And thus the show he commands achieves that deliciously voyeuristic dance on the knife-edge between sensual abandon and fascist capitulation.

For whether we're talking about Rebecca Finnegan's gut-wrenching Fraulein Schneider retreating forever into personal terror, David Lively's hypnotic Herr Schultz falling naively into the trap of presuming human decency, or Christine Sherrill's devilish Fraulein Kost going in for the sexual kill, this is a "Cabaret" where the stakes are formidable and the performers have honed their acts until they're either bleeding in front of you or making you bleed back.

Corti, who worked Bob Fosse, the movie version's choreographer, and also toured with the 1987 revival of Hal Prince's staging, finds the sourest of sweet spots between a homage to the show's splashy Fosse roots and a cleaner, darker sensibility, shorn of cliche and sentimentality.

His lead performers read as young. Very young. Young enough to be taken in. Thus this is a "Cabaret" that crackles with ambivalence and credibility.

At some points, Corti's fearless ensemble throws itself in front of footlights that reveal far more than the mirrors of "A Chorus Line." At others, Corti goes out of his way to explain just why this world was so seductive to the ill-equipped Clifford Bradshaw (played, simply but effectively, by Jim Weitzer) and his poor Sally Bowles (played by Zarah Mahler). Even Brandon Dahlquist's carefully shaded Ernst Ludwig is, for most of the show, warm and likable.

If you judge this musical by its female lead, you won't be disappointed with Mahler, a fascinating young actress who manages to suggest both that she is an addict of long standing, for whom rehab won't go smoothly, and that she's as geekily naive as a teenager splurging on useless ring tones at the mall. Mahler doesn't have doe eyes, nor does she plumb the usual vulnerable wreckage of sweet Sally gone bad. You just see, very clearly, a girl way out of her depth. Corti's clever choreography suggests she's not fully in control of her own body. And you hear her sing about it from the top to the bottom of a truly thrilling vocal register.

There is, perhaps, a bit too much going on in that iconic second-act ballad, wherein the game Mahler must compete with motion from both Clifford and the orchestra pit. If you wanted to find a flaw in Corti's conception, it could perhaps be that his attention to detail is obsessive.

Except I just talked myself out of that. The attention to detail, which translates as attention to truth, is what makes this production so exciting. It is not to be missed. Especially, meine Damen und Herren, at these prices.